LOUD SILENCE
JULES CROSBY
I talk a lot. According to my elementary school teachers, I talked too much. I was the kid constantly ‘flipping my card to red’ and sitting in time-out for chatting during class.1 But, as the prophet Tyler the Creator once said in his classic song ‘911/Mr. Lonely’, “I say the loudest in the room / Is prolly the loneliest one in the room.” And he has never lied.
Talking about anything created enough noise to distract me from the perpetual sadness I felt inside. My “gift of gab” was all deflection. I used words my whole life to inhibit myself from experiencing profound thoughts, sensations and emotions that are prompted by silence. As a gay Black boy raised in the South, silent meditation became my worst fear. Talking gave me the room to never face myself. It was safe. But, on the other side of ‘safe’, I found something life-altering.
Silence, and the intense self-examination it encourages, saved my life. Charlotte Wells’ 2022 coming-of-age drama film Aftersun forces viewers to understand the sacred significance of silence, and in doing so, conveys powerful intimacy through physical actions and cinematic style. No words necessary.
Actions speak louder than words in Aftersun. As I ruminate on the behavior of Calum (Paul Mescal) in the film, I find myself drawn to his physical movements and behaviors. His actions feel rash and a bit reckless. His arm is broken for no apparent reason, he steps out in front of a moving bus, smokes a used cigarette from off the ground and then sprints into the ocean in the middle of the night. I am not sure he ever returns.
I took note of how often Calum looks up to the sky and watches the paragliders, contemplating his existence within this enormous universe without saying a word. When he looks up, his head physically goes “in the clouds,” revealing the degree to which Calum remains out-of-touch with reality. He is physically present in the film, but also so lost in his own head that his actions communicate grave disassociation from the world around him. Even the books Calum owns tell the story of a man battling with his mental and emotional health; a copy of “How to Meditate,” “Poems, Stories and Writings” by Margaret Tait and “Tai Chi” by Paul Leonard sit on the desk in their room.
The style of production in Aftersun further imbues silence with powerful intimacy. Aftersun is shot like no movie I have ever seen before– from the camera angles to the framing, and scene transitions in between. Throughout the entire film, Wells intercuts home video footage with frenzied hallucinations and real-time events, blurring the lines between reality and each character’s own subjective memory. The camera becomes an intrusive character in the story, as it often observes Calum and his daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) in spaces that no other person really could. The camera clocks them as they interact in the middle of the ocean, miles away from civilization. There is an entire sequence in the film where Calum stands behind a closed glass door, viewers privy to a solo smoke session that almost feels like an invasion of privacy.
Other times, Wells reveals crucial details in her film through tiny keyholes or more grand stylistic devices such as the split-screen sequence that displays Calum and Sophie’s contrastive emotional dispositions. The ebb-and-flow of different visual styles evokes intimacy and reveals the psychological condition of each character, functioning just like dialogue. When the camera is positioned far away from Calum, I interpret that as Calum being far away from himself. The camera and added visual techniques in Aftersun serve as these profound, silent expressions of grief.
Keeping the same stylistic elements and physical behaviors intact, Aftersun would be an effective silent film. Silence supports the universality of this film and underscores the notion that depression remains a silent killer. Silence in Aftersun encourages interpretation and that is what Wells expects. In a note published to A24’s website, Wells states that, “there is room for you in this film too. I hope you can take it, fill it, in order to feel it."
Silence creates the space to feel the weight of Aftersun even after the credits roll and the screen goes black. Viewers are captive to the prolonged moments of silence throughout the film and forced to consider how emotional turmoil breathes, looks, behaves and manifests in their own life. As Calum opens the door and vanishes into Sophie’s memory at the end, I consider the moments I have with people long gone that are now just memories on constant loop in my head— an amalgamation of messy, confusing, non-linear seconds in time. Aftersun lodges itself in intentional irony, making the argument that silence can be just as loud as words. And it makes sense because memory is just one, giant irony of sorts. As Wells puts it in the same note to A24,
“Memory is a slippery thing; details are hazy, fickle. The more you strain, the less you see.”
Perhaps Aftersun was a simple watch for some people— maybe even anticlimactic. But I would argue that those folks fear the self-contemplation silence prompts and are unable to face certain emotions that require painful evaluation. Because that used to be me. I would have walked out of the theater if I had seen Aftersun before I came to this huge reckoning in my life about the power of silence. But by not saying much, Aftersun says everything. And I have never heard silence so loud before.
**** https://a24films.com/notes/2022/10/a-note-from-charlotte-wells ****
